Miracles Of Medicine Can't Cure Loneliness

September 25, 1987|By Don Boyett, Seminole County Editor

A time to go. The police report was clinical and straightforward, pure Joe Friday.

The officer had gone to the Altamonte Springs apartment after a suspected suicide was reported. Sure enough, as the back door was opened, the 79-year- old man was found on the kitchen floor, a gunshot wound to his head, a pistol nearby.

A nurse told of a note taped to the door, instructing her not to go in. She was to call a former neighbor, who had called police. Suicide, cut and dried. But buried in the officer's neat printing and in the words of the two who apparently knew him best was more than an old man's taking his life. (In the blank following ''Relatives of Deceased,'' the police officer penciled in ''None.'')

He had hired the nurse several years ago to care for his wife. He was blind, she had cancer, her life ended some weeks ago in a long and painful death. He then sold their home to a next-door father-son business and moved into the apartment, retaining the nurse to come by daily to cook and clean.

Several years ago, the son in the next-door business had befriended the old couple. Each morning when he went to the post office he stopped at a grocer's to pick up fixings for his lunch. ''I would call to see if they needed anything and take it to them.'' The practice continued after the old man moved; on Monday he delivered the last order.

The son and his father had feared for the old man. For as long as he would stand for it, they postponed closing on the house, hoping the grief would abate.

The nurse, too, tells of depression, despondency, of her client's saying he had nothing for which to live, of his buying a gun, completing his will on Tuesday, of talking of suicide. On Wednesday, he was dead.

Throughout history, man has sought to prolong life; in recent years, medical science has wrought miracles. But in the self-inflicted death of a lonely, grief-stricken old man is the realization that there is more to living than life.